Ronald Brownstein writes, “Obama, spurred by the economic crisis, is attempting to expand government’s reach more aggressively than President Clinton did” (emphasis added).

Update: Over at The American Prospect, Mori Dinauer doesn’t get it. My point isn’t that Obama “wants to expand the government for its own sake.” It’s that Obama’s major government-expanding initiatives, such as his health-care reform proposals and cap-and-trade, are not responses to the economic crisis. He would be supporting them even if there were no crisis. So would TAP.